


In Between Days

by Squash (JeSuisGourde)



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-06-05 16:12:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15174485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeSuisGourde/pseuds/Squash
Summary: Now that he's trapped in this numb, half-dead body, Owen exists less as a person than as a series of interim moments connecting his body to this sort of odd, liminal existence of a life. Sometimes, though, Ianto is there to make it, if not better, at least a little more interesting.





	In Between Days

**Author's Note:**

> So I was looking through my old LJ and I found a post full of bingo tables (god, remember those? I miss LJ!) from about 6 years ago that I had never filled. I figured I'd use them as fun little exercises to get me writing more. So, this is the 1sentence challenge table, using the bingo square prompt "caught in the form of limitation" from the philosophy_20 challenge table as a sort of overarching theme.

**#1 Motion**

The worst thing about being dead is that actually he's half-dead, and he can't feel anything anymore; the worst thing about being half-dead is that even though he can't feel _now_ , he can still feel the way the bullet ripped through his flesh, the exact rotation as the metal burrowed its way through skin and meat and blood vessels, the way it cracked his sternum and lodged itself in his chest; now he can't sleep, so he falls into moments of sightless daydream, punctuated by the flash of a bullet driving its way into his body, and it's just a moment of sensory terror in his own numb nightmare.

**#2 Cool**

Gwen flinches the first time she touches Owen properly; hugs don't feel right, he's cold and a little bit rubbery, like a corpse, he knows even a touch on his arm feels like poking a piece of cold food; but for every time Gwen flinches, Ianto's touch is solid and unbothered, gentle but strong on his senseless skin, and it makes him feel a bit more human.

**#3 Young**

While the rest of the team hover around the hospital staff, Owen sits tiredly on a bench in the corner and talks to Jamie; “He's just a child,” Owen grumbles against the window of the SUV later as Ianto watches him, “He shouldn't have to deal with this,”; and eight months after Owen's death, a letter arrives at the tourist office, addressed to Owen, written in chicken-scratch handwriting: _Someone told me this address would get my letter to you and I wanted to let you know that I'm cancer-free as of today_ ; Ianto's face is twisted when he walks down the stairs to the Hub, and Gwen cries on the couch while Jack stands with the letter half-crumpled in his hand, eyes trying not to stray towards Owen's station.

**#4 Last**

“You know, you're really crap at final goodbyes,” Owen corners Ianto by the coffee machine, one eyebrow cocked, and Ianto sighs and grips the counter, manages to mumble “I couldn't think of what to say, there wasn't enough time,” before Owen's hand is on his shoulder and pulling him into a hug he didn't know he was desperate for.

**#5 Wrong**

Owen skulks round the edges of the dance floor until he can find a place to lean against the wall and watch all the happy couples swaying, only now that he's stopped Ianto appears beside him in that ubiquitous way he does, and they're silent for a moment before Ianto opens his mouth and says, “You're not, you know,” and at Owen's frown, clarifies himself: “Wrong,” but when Owen scoffs at him, he shakes his head, “You've not gone off, and you're dead but you're not _dead_ -dead, you're still fundamentally _you_ , and that's got to be worth something— at least enough not to go looking for something to finish you off, right?”

**#6 Gentle**

Ianto is lying on the sofa, desperate for this migraine to stop stabbing the inside of his head and trying not to cry from the throbbing agony, when he feels someone sit down beside him; cool fingers slide into his hair and rub against his temples and he sighs, “Thank you,” Owen laughs softly in return: “At least I'm good for something,” but his voice is gentle and affectionate.

**#7 One**

Owen's feeling maudlin again, but at least the person sat across from him on the bench is Ianto, someone equally as angry-maudlin at any given moment, so he knows he won't be judged when he sighs and says “Why's it that everyone else gets one chance at this life and I get two, when I didn't even want the first chance in the first place?”

**#8 Thousand**

They're all lounging in the central area in the hub, snacking on a huge bag of crisps and sighing at intervals, when Ianto observes, “We all must spend thousands of hours in the hub, when are any of us ever going to get a life?” and Owen raises his eyebrows and gives a sort of laughing sneer: “Well, I, for one, _can't_ get a life anymore.”

**#9 King**

“I'm bored, Jack's busy, let's go weevil hunting,” Ianto suggests, tone straddling the line between bland and whining, and Owen can't help but give him a skeptical look and ask, “Jack's version of weevil hunting or mine?”, to which Ianto responds, “You're the Weevil King, it's your choice.”

**#10 Learn**

Owen is slowly learning to do things one-handed, or to maneuver his bandaged fingers in a useful way, but it's hard to do when he also has little to no sensation at all; he's just glad he wasn't so much of an idiot as to break the fingers of his right hand.

**#11 Blur**

Owen always had good knowledge of what lack of sleep did to a living body and brain, but not a dead one, and now that he's dead, he can't sleep, and though he isn't physically tired, time just blurs together into one long reel of awake-ness, and he's not sure how long he can exist like this without going mad, if he isn't already.

**#12 Wait**

“Look, just this once, wait for me on the dock, I'll even tie a marker to myself,” Owen begs as Ianto leans skeptically against his car, “I just want to see if it's anything like sleep”; Ianto gives in because he can see the exhaustion in Owen's eyes, and because after all this he can't say no.

**#13 Change**

Owen's death has changed the way that his coworkers treat him: Jack is semi-aggressive, obviously still guilty and hiding it, Tosh's crush on him seems to have faded and now he's more of a friend, but it's comfortable and he likes it, and Gwen treats him like something fragile and breakable; most surprising, though, is Ianto: their distant acquaintance has shifted into a close friendship, and Ianto's the only one who treats him like a human, aside from the never speaking ill of the dead thing.

**#14 Command**

After Owen's betrayal and before his departure, Jack made Gwen second in command, and even though it's been a while, it still hasn't changed back; Owen used to resent it, but now he's just glad he doesn't have to deal with the stress without being able to drink, sleep, or shag it away.

**#15 Hold**

“I've been on hold with this hospital for forty-five fucking minutes,” Owen complains to the room at large as he bangs things around on his desk, “And they keep transferring me to different departments—” and then he breaks off, because the man who picks up on the other end says, “Jim Garrett speaking,” and even though Owen knows it's not _that_ Jim Garrett, he has to cover his face with his hands and breathe hard through the memory and the old but still-sharp trauma before he can respond to the man saying “Hello? Hello?” on the other end of the line.

**#16 Need**

Owen always knew he was a tactile person, but now he wishes he taken more advantage of it as he watches Jack and Ianto's little touches in the hub, feeling touch-starved and jealous, and Ianto notices: “I'm sorry, we can stop, we didn't mean to—” and Owen shakes his head sharply, “No, don't— I need it, then at least I can pretend.”

**#17 Vision**

After a mishap in the archives, Ianto goes blind for three days, and Owen can't stand to leave his side; part of it is just plain over-protectiveness, and part of it is a desperation that _someone_ understand this partial sensory deprivation he constantly has to deal with; only when Ianto's sight comes back he can't stop talking about how every other sense was so much _more_ intense, and it's nothing like the numbness Owen lives behind every day.

**#18 Attention**

When Owen is the centre of Ianto's attention, he squirms and grumbles, feeling exposed and too fragile, like those blue eyes can just reach into him and pull apart his every fibre, make him feel alive again; but when Ianto's focus is turned elsewhere, it's all Owen can do to bother and wheedle and snark until those knowing eyes are on him again.

**#19 Soul**

Owen is a scientist, he's never believed in a soul or in god or in some other supernatural force, but on days when he can't stand living in this dead and senseless body, he wishes he knew what bullshit power was keeping him here.

**#20 Picture**

He's had to turn his photos of Katie and Diane around to face the wall, because it used to be that when looking at them got to be too much, and the pain started to be overwhelming, he'd just go out and drink it all away; now all he can do is sit there and think too much about what-ifs.

**#21 Fool**

“You idiot,” Ianto is yanking him into the building, away from the wounded and snarling alien they've both just shot, “You could have gotten hurt, that thing could have ripped you apart,” but Owen interrupts by jerking out of Ianto's grip, snarling, “I'm not the idiot here: _I_ can't die, and you can, and I'd rather be in pieces than have another one of us die for real.”

**#22 Mad**

If this job hadn't driven him mad years ago, Owen knows the sensory deprivation of this living death would have pushed him off the deep end; sometimes, in the middle of a sleepless night, when he wishes something or someone would come and just kill him for real this time, he wonders if he's managed to find an even deeper insanity.

**#23 Child**

He wasn't there for the child's first new breath, but sometimes he imagines what it would be like to breathe again, pushes on his diaphragm and then tries to pull air into his lungs, only he knows he'll never feel them fill again.

**#24 Now**

Jack is engrossed in old photos of his time in the circus, mourning his friends and colleagues from way back when; Ianto has been sitting in the tourist centre, consumed with thoughts of his mum and the cuts and bruises of his childhood; and somehow Owen, lately so trapped in the past, is stuck painfully aware of the present, because suddenly, out of nowhere, it feels like he can't breathe.

**#25 Shadow**

“I just keep looking for the Night Travelers in photographs in the archives,” Ianto confesses drunkenly while he drains a beer and Owen nurses a whiskey, “I'm afraid they'll come back,” and Owen's hands are cold when he places them on Ianto's, but his voice is gentle when he reassures, “This time, though, we know how to stop them.”

**#26 Goodbye**

It's unfair, Owen decides, that every time he's been ready for everything to end, something pulls him back into existence; it's been a rough few weeks, and Owen is fully ready to step out from cover and into the alien's line of fire, but Ianto's look of knowing desperation cuts deeper than the bullet lodged in his chest, and he's suddenly not ready to say goodbye.

**#27 Hide**

Due to Jack being notoriously terrible with partner stakeouts, Owen and Ianto are paired together in a darkened corner of the docks, sandbags as their slightly uncomfortable seating arrangements; it turns out, however, that neither of them are patient enough for stakeouts either, and when it's been too long without any movement from the suspect, one mouth covers another in the dark, and suddenly the sandbags feel more comfortable than before.

**#28 Fortune**

Sometimes Owen hates this job, with its trauma and misery and unending death of all types, and most of the time he's ambivalent, torn between the fascination and hurt, the adrenaline rush and the terror, the horrible overlap between the survivors and the victims; sometimes, though, when he saves someone, when he discovers something, when someone thanks him before the retcon sets in, he is so glad this job found him.

**#29 Safe**

“Can I stay here?” Ianto asks, leaning against Owen's front door, shaking, tear tracks dried on his face, and flinches as another Bonfire Night firework ignites the sky, “It all just reminds me of Canary Wharf, and I feel safe here” and Owen tells him yes of course, finds him some tea, and doesn't mention it when Ianto burrows into his side every time a firework assaults the air.

**#30 Ghost**

“Pat called me today,” Owen says, watching almost jealously as Ianto sips his coffee, “Told me she's doing all right, says we should visit her,” and Ianto nudges him a bit, grinning, “Remember when we thought her signal was a ghost?”; Owen shoves back playfully, “Remember when you _liked camping_ , you freak?”

**#31 Book**

Sometimes Ianto crashes on Owen's couch, claiming its convenient proximity to the hub as an excuse, but really, he just likes waking up in the wee hours to watch Owen spend his own sleepless hours reading, one hand draped over the arm of the couch to circle protectively around an ankle or rest lightly on top of hair.

**#32 Eye**

Owen spends half the day trying to catch Ianto's eye, because it's Valentine's Day, and Gwen has been dreaming of romantic dates since she got in, and Tosh somehow still has hope she might find someone nice for the night, but Owen doesn't have hope like that anymore, and he knows Jack's never been one for holiday romance; when he finally does corner Ianto, who's gritting his teeth at the coffee machine, he doesn't even have to open his mouth before Ianto says “Yes, get me out of here, please.”

**#33 Never**

Sometimes, late at night, they ask each other the questions they're supposed to avoid, like, “What did you want your life to be, before this?” and Owen can say, “I was a real doctor once, I almost got married once, I didn't used to be such a bastard, I could have had an amazing life,” and Ianto can say “While I was at uni and after, I could learn anything if you just showed me once, but no job was interesting enough for me to stay, I was even on the verge of leaving Torchwood when I met Lisa,” and both of them will feel the bruise of the past and think, “I never thought I'd get trapped in a life like this.”

**#34 Sing**

Jack sings all the time, and most of the time it irritates the shit out of Owen when he won't shut the fuck up, but there's a difference between Jack's obnoxious upbeat 1940's ditties and the earthy sound of Ianto singing old, dark folk songs or riffing on Nick Cave low under his breath as they trudge along the banks of the River Taff at three in the morning.

**#35 Sudden**

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” he says to Gwen, not because this un-death is anything like the grief of families of missing people, but because he remembers the pain and the emptiness and the un-death of sudden, unexplained loss, and he knew that what he needed when he lost Katie was not anything that Torchwood can give, because it was something he never got.

**#36 Stop**

“So,” he starts, as Ianto walks through his front door, “Gwen is moping and Jack hasn't spoken to you in two days, what did you do?” and the look on Ianto's face is long-suffering when he replies, “I told Gwen about our asylum on Flat Holm,” and Owen, who only knows about the place in passing, shakes his head grimly and moves to get Ianto a beer, “This fucking job.”

**#37 Time**

It's four a.m. and Ianto is sat on Owen's couch, watching the man wear grooves into his floorboards as he clenches and unclenches his fists, and then he's sighing and turning to Ianto with a frustrated outburst: “Before all this, at least I could amuse myself, I was happy wasting time with fucking and drinking and all that; now I have all the time in the world and all I can do is just _sit_ here and watch it tick away and I can't even _sleep_.”

**#38 Wash**

Owen is trying to be as steady and gentle as possible as he cleans the three massive, bloody slashes on Ianto's back, flinching every time Ianto hisses in pain, and hoping Jack has incinerated the creature that did this; he orders Ianto on bedrest, and takes him back to his own apartment so he can keep an eye on the wounds and redress them if needed (but mostly he just can't stand the idea of Ianto being out of his sight right now).

**#39 Torn**

“When I was little,” Owen murmurs, watching the rise and fall of Gwen's chest as she sleeps off her injuries in the med bay, “I used to hope that god existed, even though I didn't believe it, because I hoped maybe something out there would bloody fucking listen for once, but now I can't even hope,” and Ianto, who, like Owen, has spent too much of his time making wishes and promises to empty graves and sullen skies, shrugs and says, “I don't know, I think most of the time hoping rips you apart more than not believing at all.”

**#40 History**

They're sat on Owen's couch, watching late night telly when Ianto looks up, all worry-gnawed lips and puppy-dog eyes and asks, “Want to know why I didn't say anything those times we thought you were dying for good?” and Owen shifts Ianto's feet in his lap and raises his eyebrows, humming a little as if to say, “Well, yes, go on,” and Ianto ducks his head, voice dull as he confesses, “I felt like it could have been my fault, when I shot you; if you'd have moved just a little I could have killed you and it would have stuck, and I still feel guilty.”

**#41 Power**

“You know, we should have,” Ianto states one morning as he watches Owen play a video game at his desk instead of working, and Owen gives him a look and prompts, “Should have _what_?” because he knows that's what's expected, and Ianto is almost unreadable except for a rueful smile curling at the corners of his mouth as he replies, “Had sex, back when the phones were all down and the world was ending; it could have been nice, and we can't do it anymore,” and Owen doesn't respond except to nod, but his own smirk is equally as rueful.

**#42 Bother**

Ianto manages to find his phone and flick it open without opening his eyes, and greets the person on the other end with a half-mumbled, “Owen, I know you don't sleep anymore, but we work for Torchwood, and sleep is a rare luxury at best, and I—” but Owen is interrupting him, sounding almost equally tired, “I know, and I really didn't want to bother you, but I went down to the docks tonight to just get some genuine _fucking quiet_ , but I kind of fell into a sort of sleep and got washed down to Penarth and I _really_ don't want to walk and will you please come get me?”

**#43 God**

“If god does not exist, then I am god,” Ianto quotes, coming to sit beside Owen as they wait for Owen's new test results and watch Jack pull governmental strings in his office, and Owen leans his head on Ianto's shoulder and sighs, “If I were god, I wouldn't have gotten myself stuck in this shithole life, so I don't think that's true, either.”

**#44 Wall**

Pinned by rubble, the broken window a guillotine above him, Owen is terrified not by the possible mutilation that dangles by a thread, but by the dust-filled silence around him, not a sound from the rest of his teammates, not a scream nor the movement of bricks being tossed around, and he's paralyzed by the fear that he might not be able to save any of them.

**#45 Naked**

Watching the city burn and collapse, with the heartbreaking sound of his teammates halfway to tears in his ear, Owen feels stripped naked of all confidence, all knowledge, all anything except despair and horror and the suddenly incongruous desire to be able to cry or hyperventilate or something again, just to get all the overwhelming distress out of this benumbed body.

**#46 Drive**

Owen is momentarily glad for whatever sort of fucked up, adrenaline-junkie, self-esteem-so-fucked-as-to-be-selfless type insanity that drives him, because he has no real idea what he's doing in this power plant, all he knows is that he's meant to sacrifice himself if he has to because that's what he _does_ , that's what Torchwood is here to _do_ , and he just wants to keep as many people alive as he can.

**#47 Harm**

He hears the hitch in Tosh's breath, nothing like tears and everything like agony, and he knows they're both going to die tonight; strangely, what he wishes for the most is to be able to feel again—he's not sure why, but this time he just wants it at least to _hurt._

**#48 Precious**

Life was never that precious to Owen, he spent most of his life looking for an easy way out, but when you know your existence is about to be ripped from you, you can't stop the instinct to just start _screaming;_ Owen doesn't exactly know what it is he's clinging to, but god does he want to hold on as tight as can.

**#49 Hunger**

When he was younger, Owen used to hunger for a purpose, for his life to _mean something_ , to prove himself and his mother wrong, and after Katie, he decided there was no meaning, and he was still here just because he was such a coward; now he knows his purpose is this: this death, this life, this un-life, this sacrifice, the skin he watches blister and slough off, the slow decay that doesn't hurt but still feels like agony because he has the time to think back on his life and no, he wouldn't do it again, and yes, he's honestly ready to die, but he's really going to _fucking_ miss his friends.

**#50 Believe**

Ianto has to believe that he can keep going after this, that losing Tosh and Owen—which is like losing family, friends, and lovers all rolled into one—won't be the thing that breaks him, but waking up alone makes him ache, and calling a phone that's no longer in service is like a punch to the gut, and catching Owen's scent in random corners of the hub makes him want to double over with grief; and even though he's walking upright, it's like he's walking through a world that's darker, muffled, lesser for the lack of the people he's come to love so much.

 


End file.
